The Response
When media outlets label these anxious days “America in Crisis,” as an (otherwise solid) NBC special did last night, it’s important they state clearly that the crisis is not the protests, but the virulent racism that made the protests necessary.
Even then, it’s possible that the exclamatory language of “Crisis!”—in conjunction with endless imagery of police on the street in full riot gear—is a sort of dog whistle to those who believe that dissent is fundamentally dysfunctional. In reality, dissent is a social immune response, the swelling of the body politic at the site of a wound. In the best-case scenario, the result is health that is not only renewed but transformed—a hardier society with greater resistance.
As we’ve all learned in the national biology lessons of the Covid era, immune systems can be capricious; the response can overwhelm the body. But we’ve also learned that without any response, our bodies are playgrounds for pathogens. In the body, as in the nation, the proposition becomes this: Resist or perish. The question is, what is a properly calibrated resistance? What kind of response leads to sustained health?
Media discourse—both verbal and visual—that proposes the false equation “protest = crisis” misreads both the cause of our national pain and the course of our recovery. The real prognosis, while still provisional, may be be better than the discourse is letting on: Dissent, on the whole, might be doing the job it’s meant to do, the one the founders had in mind when they established the rights of free speech and assembly.
If the protests remain peaceful—which is not to say passive—we should (should!) see the language of crisis subside as the media and the nation realize that we are witnessing not only sustained dissent but the birth of a sustainable movement for a more just America.
Next step, voting. Beyond that, policy.
– Text and illustration by Greg Blake Miller
American Crossroads
At some point, when the embers cool on the street and the news channels move on from the 24/7 coast-to-coast feed, the image we’ll need to remember is the one that started it all—the murder of George Floyd.
We will need to memorialize Floyd not only with tears, but with policy. The policy must not end with a revision of police procedures; it must include a rethinking of the American community. We can no longer consign entire neighborhoods, regions, races to the American Upside-Down in which the achievement of some modicum of stability, peace, and security is the stuff of against-all-odds TV movies. We must at last acknowledge that access to quality housing, healthcare and education is not a privilege but a right—the place from which a healthy society is born.
Food, shelter, health and learning are the proverbial bootstraps by which we keep telling Americans to pull themselves up. An America that cannot or will not allocate the resources for these bootstraps and yet continues to call itself the land of opportunity is a nation in the killing grip of delusion. We have a choice before us: concerted, optimistic action or defeatist self-destruction.
How, exactly, will we choose to make America great?
– Greg Blake Miller
Turning Off My Phone at Midnight
Staggered and beaten by pixels,
I fade, float, try to sink into warm cavelike analog darkness,
Blue light swimming on the walls,
My eyelids invaded by the inhuman outer glow of information,
Endless, bottomless, underworld stuff
Devoid even of the spirit of Hades,
Immaterial material,
Materialism without material,
Nothing tactile to reform or remake or melt or beat into ploughshares,
Weapons of inner war now securely tucked inside my mind
To deny even the independence of my disobedient dreams,
The dreams of a beaten man,
A man beaten by the infinite contents of his own pocket.
– Greg Blake Miller
Authoritarianism Made Easy!
I know what you’re going through: You want to be an authoritarian, and it’s just taking too long. Here’s a secret: While you’re busy listening to the so-called “experts,” reading up on the Establishment’s “classics of authoritarianism” and deciding on your authoritarian “belief system,” others are cutting out the waste and actually being authoritarians. Think about it: You’re TRYING to be an authoritarian, while they’re actually living the authoritarian life. They’ve simplified their goals, clarified their message, and taken action on their dreams.
Well, now it makes sense to ask, “What do they know that I don’t?”
I’m here to help.
Today I’m going to let you in on what I’ve learned in decades of successful authoritarianism. Most aspiring authoritarians are wasting time and money on old-school “solutions” like authoritarian policymaking and crafting coherent authoritarian ideologies. With my simple seven-step program, you’ll learn secrets that can save you valuable energy that would be better used on the things you really want to do, like attacking enemies and watching television. These techniques have been used by successful authoritarians the world over. Don’t take it from me, take it from the well-known dictator Josef Stalin, who used these techniques in such brilliant managerial moves as The Campaign Against Trotskyites and The Denunciation of Rootless Cosmopolitans.
The simple tools I’m going to teach you work whether you consider yourself “right” or “left” or even simply “wrong.” True authoritarians know that these directional signals are window-dressing, the result of years of squandered energy in pursuit of old, tired ideas such as “justifying my draconian actions” and “building a seemingly coherent intellectual rationale for a crackdown.” If you’ve been spinning your wheels on such projects, you know that the only “right” is “I’m right” and the only “left” is “You’ve been left behind.” Don’t miss the opportunity to learn our PowerOfPower7™ Secrets today. No less an authority than the renowned authoritarian Adolf Hitler agreed with Stalin on these seven simple steps—and those guys couldn’t agree on anything. Well, there was that once, but we’ll blame that on Molotov and Ribbentrop.
This is the beginning of a journey that will allow you to overcome your inhibitions, silence your rivals, and bend the arc of history whichever way you damn well please. Why wait? Let’s get to the first Seven Steps!
Authoritarianism Made Easy, Lesson One:
Ridding Yourself of Rivals: Setting up Scapegoats in the Power Structure
- Assert authority. | You alone can fix it!
- Delegate authority. | Work smarter, not harder!
- Renounce responsibility. | It’s not your fault!
- Denounce those to whom you’ve delegated. | It’s their fault.
- Inflame the people against rival power bases. | Leverage the power of blame!
- Assert authority. | You alone can fix it.
- Purge rival power bases. | Winning.
With these simple steps, you’ll be dispatching enemies within days. Don’t waste time taking responsibility when you can be taking power! By putting these lessons to use today, you’ll take your first step* toward The Power of Power™ and impact countless lives in your community, or what’s left of it.
*Just for you we have a very special offer available today only: Write to us with your name, e-mail address, and checking account number, we’ll send you, at no cost, Lesson 2: Becoming Your Own Public Disinformation Officer.
– Text and illustration by Greg Blake Miller
There Will Be No Game Today
The spring of 2020
Is the player to be named later,
Left out of the headlines,
Which promised a bargain
For our side.
But these stories
Were based on insufficient data.
The reporting was incomplete,
Whether out of laziness
Or simple humanity:
Who knew?
Who knew that
When the deal was completed
It would turn out
That the Other Side
Had gotten everything.
– Greg Blake Miller
The Rebels’ Run to Glory, 1990
Thirty years ago today, a team, a coach, and a city forged a dream of “electric togetherness.” Read “The Rebel Alliance,” the story behind the 1990 UNLV men’s basketball team’s run to glory.
Dept. of Flying Time: I wrote this feature in 2010 for Vegas Seven to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the victory, when the city was in the doldrums of a very different crisis. Now, as then, we could use a little of that old electric togetherness—with appropriate social distancing, of course!
Be safe, be strong, be well!
– Greg Blake Miller
The Escape
They seemed so sure just who I was
And just where the winds would take me
And just what I dreamed when I slept alone
Beneath the willow tree
And that the blossom in a young girl’s eyes
Like a gypsy dream revealed tomorrow
And even the streetcorner saints
Wished me well on the path
I was sure to follow.
And they cleared the road
And swept the dust
But it clouded my vision
And I just saw hands
Grabbing, taking, giving with strings
Dreaming their dreams
In my unsure skin.
On desire’s rickshaw I rattled ahead
Upon their gladly burdened shoulders
And the city of gold glistened before me
And I glimpsed the crown that I would wear
And I turned with a start and tumbled out
And scraped my knee on sandy ground
And wound my way through crowded streets
And disappeared among the unknowns
And at the end of the path, the place I sought:
Before me, green grass, and a place called home.
– Greg Blake Miller, July 23, 1993
From the Archives: A Historic District of the Mind
In 2003, city leaders created Las Vegas’ first official historic district, the John S. Park Neighborhood. It was a step forward for a city whose fondest architectural tradition had seemed, at times, to be the teardown. For a moment, the celebratory implosion and the parade of earthmovers was supplanted by an official acknowledgment that physical structures could be vessels of communal memory. It was a gesture toward our maturity as a city, toward our capacity to understand that as we move headlong into the future, the past has something to teach us—that it whispers of the humanity we share with our civic forebears, in all of their striving, their small joys and disappointments, their successes and imperfections.
In this essay for Las Vegas Life,“A Historic District of the Mind,” I argued that, while the official designation was important, the future of local history depended first of all on our willingness as citizens to acknowledge that we are a part of history, and history is a part of us. In other words, history begins with our own capacity to make memories and to appreciate the places where memories are made. Civic action begins with individual consciousness; civic wisdom begins with individual willingness to slow down, take a backward glance, and reflect.
Read “A Historic District of the Mind” here.
Illustration by Steve Brodner for Las Vegas Life, 2003.
A Man of Appetite
In the summer of 2001, as the 35th anniversary of the opening of Caesars Palace approached, I was asked by Las Vegas Life to report and reflect on the life of Caesars founder Jay Sarno. Here is the resulting story, “A Man of Appetite,” from the magazine’s August 5, 2001 issue:
Toward the end, Jay Sarno, father of the Vegas theme resort, was big-bellied, full-cheeked, and insatiably hungry. He was known on occasion to diet, which meant replacing his breakfast salami with filet mignon. He rehabilitated his bum ticker by hoisting an ice-cream cone in each fist. He had philandered his way out of a marriage, gambled his way out of a million and dreamed his way out of the casino business. He hoped to remedy this state of affairs with girls, dice and dreams.
Indulgence, for Sarno, had always been part of a creative process. You want something. You taste it. You re-create it, writ large, for the world. If you want to party like Bachhus, you build the Bacchanal room and serve six-course meals with neck rubs and bottomless wine goblets. “His insights all came from his own appetites,” says Don Williams, Sarno’s right-hand-man at Circus Circus in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “Get prettier girls, build bigger buildings, get better restaurants, have bigger gamblers around. All these things came from his loins, not his brain.”
Sarno was the Freud and Ford of Las Vegas, the first in town to fully realize the link between our dreams and our appetites. The central assumption of his career was that we wanted the same things he did. Once upon a time, Sarno decided that he wanted a palace. So he built one and called it Caesars. That’s plural, no apostrophe. Every guest was an emperor. Sarno knew that we, too, had dreams. We, too, were hungry.
Caesars Palace opened on August 5, 1966, with a three-day party featuring 1,400 well-heeled invitees, an Andy Williams-fronted show and a busty blond Cleopatra as greeter. The Palace wasn’t just a resort, it was a pageant. It was a wild baroque dream of imperial antiquity, and the artifacts of the dream were everywhere, from the come-hither Roman costumes of cocktail girls to the curve of the bathroom faucets. Out front, a statue reproduction of the Winged Victory of Samothrace reached skyward from a great oblong pool—a headless sentry leading you to a place where you, like fiddling Nero, were welcome to lose your head. For the first time, a Vegas hotel was all about storytelling, a suspension of disbelief.
From 1965, when construction began, to 1969, when he sold the palace, Sarno worked ceaselessly to create the resort experience he wanted, He kept his hands on as many facets of the operation as possible. While designing the Palace, he traveled to Europe and photographed columns, pilasters, rooftops and flying buttresses. He spared few expenses. He wanted marble sculpture, so he headed to the town where Michelangelo had obtained marble.
The hotel’s theme, in truth, was not Imperial Rome, but Sarno’s vision of it: Faithfulness to that vision was more important than verisimilitude. Sarno had the help of designer Jo Harris, who would often tone down or transform or harmonize his exuberant concepts. But in the end, the place was Sarno’s, and it kept him running … READ MORE from the original magazine layout. Story picks up from here at the end of the first page.
Kobe
Woke up this morning
And, fuck, it’s still true.
In the country of basketball,
Where my soul spent its youth:
All of the flags
At half-mast.
– GBM
Reentry Shock 